"This lavishly illustrated volume takes the reader on a private tour of the gardens of nearly twenty of the most renowned movers and shakers of the fashion world."--Book jacket flap

Mention the French and most minds overflow with symbols of their panache: sensuous velvets, leopard prints, toile, silk taffeta curtains, deep bullion trim, and eighteenth-century furnishings. The truth is, it is difficult not to fall under the influence of the French, whose uncommon grace is inherent in everything they do. Inspired by their rich cultural heritage and the breathtaking beauty of their country, their celebrated approach to living, dressing and dining is as distinctive as their decorating, which is undeniably the essence of French chic. From their rock-crystal chandeliers and Aubusson rugs, to their exquisite tapestries, feather-filled armchairs, and painstakingly carved armoires, the American appetite for French style is endless. Following on the heels of Provencal Interiors: French Country Style in America and French by Design, in French Influences, Betty Lou Phillips delves into the world of design francais once again, illustrating through lavish color photography how, room by room, French elegance remas the creme de la creme.

Includes, beginning Sept. 15, 1954 (and on the 15th of each month, Sept.-May) a special section: School library journal, ISSN 0000-0035, (called Junior libraries, 1954-May 1961). Also issued separately.

British Fashion Design explores the tensions between fashion as art form, and the demands of a ruthlessly commercial industry. Based on interviews and research conducted over a number of years, Angela McRobbie charts the flow of art school fashion graduates into the industry; their attempts to reconcile training with practice, and their precarious position between the twin supports of the education system and the commercial sector. Stressing the social context of cultural production, McRobbie focuses on British fashion and its graduate designers as products of youth street culture, and analyses how designers from diverse backgrounds have created a labour market for themselves, remodelling `enterprise culture` to suit their own careers.

Humans have long turned to gardens—both real and imaginary—for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. Those gardens may be as far away from everyday reality as Gilgamesh’s garden of the gods or as near as our own backyard, but in their very conception and the marks they bear of human care and cultivation, gardens stand as restorative, nourishing, necessary havens. With Gardens, Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens evoke the human condition. Moving from from the gardens of ancient philosophers to the gardens of homeless people in contemporary New York, he shows how, again and again, the garden has served as a check against the destruction and losses of history. The ancients, explains Harrison, viewed gardens as both a model and a location for the laborious self-cultivation and self-improvement that are essential to serenity and enlightenment, an association that has continued throughout the ages. The Bible and Qur’an; Plato’s Academy and Epicurus’s Garden School; Zen rock and Islamic carpet gardens; Boccaccio, Rihaku, Capek, Cao Xueqin, Italo Calvino, Ariosto, Michel Tournier, and Hannah Arendt—all come into play as this work explores the ways in which the concept and reality of the garden has informed human thinking about mortality, order, and power. Alive with the echoes and arguments of Western thought, Gardens is a fitting continuation of the intellectual journeys of Harrison’s earlier classics, Forests and The Dominion of the Dead. Voltaire famously urged us to cultivate our gardens; with this compelling volume, Robert Pogue Harrison reminds us of the nature of that responsibility—and its enduring importance to humanity. "I find myself completely besotted by a new book titled Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison. The author . . . is one of the very best cultural critics at work today. He is a man of deep learning, immense generosity of spirit, passionate curiosity and manifold rhetorical gifts."—Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune "This book is about gardens as a metaphor for the human condition. . . . Harrison draws freely and with brilliance from 5,000 years of Western literature and criticism, including works on philosophy and garden history. . . . He is a careful as well as an inspiring scholar."—Tom Turner, Times Higher Education "When I was a student, my Cambridge supervisor said, in the Olympian tone characteristic of his kind, that the only living literary critics for whom he would sell his shirt were William Empson and G. Wilson Knight. Having spent the subsequent 30 years in the febrile world of academic Lit. Crit. . . . I’m not sure that I’d sell my shirt for any living critic. But if there had to be one, it would unquestionably be Robert Pogue Harrison, whose study Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, published in 1992, has the true quality of literature, not of criticism—it stays with you, like an amiable ghost, long after you read it. “Though more modest in scope, this new book is similarly destined to become a classic. It has two principal heroes: the ancient philosopher Epicurus . . . and the wonderfully witty Czech writer Karel Capek, apropos of whom it is remarked that, whereas most people believe gardening to be a subset of life, ‘gardeners, including Capek, understand that life is a subset of gardening.’”—Jonathan Bate, The Spectator